Jordanian soldiers carry Syrian refugee children after they crossed into Jordanian territory Thursday with their families, near the northeastern Jordanian border with Syria and Iraq. Jordan hosts about 630,000 Syrian refugees, who now make up about 10 percent of the country’s population.

And now, it’s not just the usual suspects raising a fuss. Even Democrats and typically dispassionate observers have begun to ask aloud whether the strategic and humanitarian disaster surrounding Damascus has discredited the “Obama Doctrine.”

Now, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen calls Syria “the biggest blot on the Obama presidency, a debacle of staggering proportions.” The White House’s shifting strategic sands, Cohen writes, have unintentionally revealed an inconvenient truth. “American interventionism can have terrible consequences, as the Iraq war has demonstrated. But American noninterventionism can be equally devastating, as Syria illustrates. Not doing something is no less of a decision than doing it.”

Yet the trouble is graver even than that. There could be a method to what strikes Obama’s critics as madness. He may have immersed the U.S. in the kind of multilevel game that the highest geopolitical stakes are made of, pulling Russia away from Europe to ensnare it in a 21st-century version of its own costly and humiliating experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

But we don’t know if this is so. And from the standpoint of American voters in particular, we can’t know – not just because Obama won’t tell us, but because his administration’s apparent loss of control has stripped it of credibility.

That’s a problem all on its own. It’s a particularly acute problem during a presidential election season. And if Joe Biden doesn’t throw his hat in the ring, there won’t be anyone in the administration who voters will be able to press for answers, for reassurance, for anything.

These are the crises of confidence that political power vacuums are made of. In normal times, the advantage would go to the shadow government – the policy establishment in league with the political opposition. But these are not normal times.

Even among Democrats, the alternative to the Obama Doctrine is mostly a question mark. Bernie Sanders, the Left’s thoughtful and principled insurgent, has stayed all but mum on the whole issue of foreign policy. (Hillary Clinton’s substitute for an answer: She’d simply add another row of teeth.)

But the real abnormality is on astounding display in the GOP, where not a single candidate has gained traction by advancing a recognizably traditional Republican platform on foreign policy.

To be sure, front-runner Donald Trump has tapped into public frustration by cueing up visions of an America that can get its way in the world again. Even Trump, however, has restricted himself to a handful of generalities.

Ben Carson, of late riding high in the No. 2 polling position, has said even less about foreign policy than has Trump. And, much like Trump and Sanders, it appears this calculated lack of specifics is being rewarded.

At first blush, that suggests a strange contradiction with the punishment Obama is receiving for his own strategic vagueness in Syria. But on closer inspection, it seems clear that what now rules the foreign policy judgment of American voters is the dispositional difference between Obama on the one hand and both parties’ insurgents on the other.

Obama’s attitude of aloof ambiguity strikes a sharp, simultaneous contrast with Trump’s spirit of truculence, Carson’s spirit of forbearance and Sanders’ spirit of social justice. Deepening the disjunction, Syria seems to highlight how the White House has struggled to execute internationally while also minding the store at home. At the heart of the Trump, Carson and Sanders campaigns is the central message that the state of the union is bad, and that only by attending to our own necessities and imperatives first can we restore what Obama has allowed to sour.

Whether you agree, that is no excuse for simply dispensing with a grand strategy. It is certainly not a license to give up on a carefully considered foreign policy. If that happens – despite the president’s success at avoiding a handful of catastrophes outside Syria – it is clear where we ought to lay blame.

Obama’s foreign policy has a mixed record. But the sheer confusion it has sown amounts to its own kind of disaster.

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